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As has been mentioned previously, the current version of Cubiquity is no longer under active development as the focus has shifted to a replacement ‘Cubiquity 2’ system which is being developed outside of the ‘Volumes of Fun’ brand. Although the replacement system is still a long way from being ready, I feel it is time to remove the current version from the Unity Asset Store.

The reason is that I don’t want to encourage people to use a system which I no longer have the time and resources to support, and I think that having the system available on the asset store does exactly this. Cubiquity for Unity3D was developed under Unity 4 and has only limited testing under Unity 5, and as the Unity 5.x series progresses I’m increasingly becoming aware of problems which I don’t have time to investigate.

The system will remain available on BitBucket as it is open source software, but that provides a slightly higher barrier to entry and comes with a warning about the system no longer being developed. I’m expecting that Cubiquity 2 will go on GitHub to avoid any confusion between the two versions, but more on that in the future.

Voxeliens is a retro-style arcade shooter and is essentially a 3D voxel-based version of Space Invaders. We released the game in 2012, showed it off at the Develop Conference and have had it accepted for Steam Greenlight. However, as mentioned in several previous blog posts, time is no longer on our side and we are re-focusing our efforts on the next version of Cubiquity.

Therefore we have decided to release Voxeliens for free under the MIT license. It now lives on BitBucket alongside PolyVox and Cubiquity (our voxel engines) and prebuilt binaries for Windows are also provided. It should also be possible to built it from source (including on Linux) but this has not been well tested on systems other than our own.

We put a lot of work into Voxeliens so we are pleased to now be able to share it with a much larger audience. Note that we do still have the option of selling it on Steam in the future (the Greenlight campaign remains valid) but it is not clear whether we will due to the setup, testing, and support required. At any rate, we hope you enjoy the game!

I made the first public release of PolyVox nearly 10 years ago on the Ogre 3D forums. At the time it was just a simple demo to show how voxels and Marching Cubes could be used to create more dynamic environments, but over the years it evolved into a stand-alone library which has been used by several games and our own Cubiquity voxel engine. It’s been a big part of my life for the last 10 years, but as mentioned in previous blog posts I now have less time and am over-committed with the various projects I’m involved in.

Therefore I have decided to officially cease development on PolyVox, though in practice it has not seen much work for the last couple of years. This follows the wrapping up of the current version of Cubiquity last year, and my plan is still to put the majority of my development time into ‘Cubiquity 2’. This will be completely new voxel engine with more limited scope and a focus on research rather than production use (i.e. for the more adventurous!).

More generally, I have some intention of winding down the rest of ‘Volumes of Fun’ over the coming months and breaking Cubiquity 2 into a standalone organisation and/or project on GitHub. But the details of this aren’t really clear yet, and we also need to work out what to do with Voxeliens. For now the existing support channels (e.g. the forums) will remain open and I expect I’ll just provide email support if/when they disappear.

In our last blog post we laid out a new direction for our Cubiquity voxel engine, including open sourcing the code and shifting the focus towards research for a future Cubiquity version 2. The first part of this is now complete, and the whole technology stack is now available under the MIT license:

The main advantage (as well as freedom!) of this new MIT release is that users can attempt to compile the core Cubiquity library for new platforms whereas we previously only supported Windows, OS X, and Linux. You’ll be own your own here (there are no real build instructions), but we have had reports of it working at least on the iPhone.

When we began working on Cubiquity the main idea was to expose our PolyVox library through a higher-level interface and tools. PolyVox is powerful and flexible, but requires a strong knowledge of C++, templates and computer graphics to use effectively. By wrapping this in Cubiquity and integrating it with Unity/Unreal we were hoping to bring (some of) it’s capabilities to a larger audience.

The project has been a reasonable success, with a lot of interest from the Unity and Unreal communities and even a game launched on Steam using the technology. However, it is also clear that the original vision is simply too large to finish as a personal side project, especially with diminishing amounts of free time and a desire to adjust my work/life balance. This led to use recently releasing the system for free, but further steps need to be taken to actually reduce the scope.

In this blog post I want to outline the areas in which I/we will be cutting back on development, and explain how it will affect existing users. I also want to define a direction for a future ‘Cubiquity 2.0’ such that it is both smaller and also more technically interesting to work on. This means shifting the focus to research rather than delivering a drop-in system, open-sourcing the complete technology stack, and reducing (but not eliminating) the level of integration provided for Unity and Unreal.

Last weekend David and I took part in our first ‘game jam’ event. As part of Ludum Dare 33 we had 72 hours in which to make a game from scratch (or as close to that as possible) following a prescribed theme. You can find our live-updates that David was posting throughout the weekend on our Ludum Dare page (start from the bottom) but I’ll give a summary here.

Just a quick notice for those who have been waiting on news of the Unreal Engine 4 integration of Cubiquity. Today I have released a pre-alpha development preview of the plugin.

Development is happening on GitHub under our new GitHub organisation. If you want to keep up-to-date with the latest developments, that’s the place to be. For information about how to test out the plugin, see the post on the Unreal Engine forums.

Do note that this is still a very early release which while functional is quite rough around the edges. Expect bugs and missing features but do let me know on the Unreal Engine forum post if you give it a try or of there are features want.

Well we’ve got some exciting news today – we’re pleased to announce that Cubiquity for Unity3D is now available for free! It has always been free for non-commercial and evaluation use, but we are removing this restriction so that you can use the system for commercial purposes too. This is effective immediately, and you can download Cubiquity for Unity3D via the asset store or from BitBucket.

Cubiquity let’s you create natural voxel terrains and edit them in real time, or build your worlds from millions of tiny colored cubes.

So what has led to this decision? Well, there are a number of factors at play here:

We’ve recently been doing some work in PolyVox to switch the ordering of voxel data from linear order to Morton order. This work is now complete, and in this relatively technical post I’m going to highlight a couple of the interesting tricks which we came across while doing it. Hopefully these will be beneficial to other people working on the low-level details of voxel engines.

Like many voxel engines, PolyVox allows volume data to be broken down into a number of ‘chunks’. The primary advantage of this approach is that not all the data has to be loaded into memory at the same time, and we can instead load and unload chunks on demand. Note that this is an implementation detail of the our ‘PagedVolume’ class, and algorithms which operate on the data (mesh extractors, raycasting, etc) are not aware that the data is stored in this way.

The size of each chunk can be specified by the user (with the ideal size depending on a number of factors) but typically contain 32³, 64³, or 128³ voxels. The ‘ordering’ of these voxels refers to the way they are laid out in memory, and two possibilities are shown below for the 2D case. The linear ordering is the easiest to understand and can be traversed with a simple nested for loop, but the Morton ordering brings numerous benefits in terms of locality of reference, ease of downsampling, and increased compressibility.

Linear ordering (left) vs. Morton ordering (right)

However, the purpose of this blog post is not to explain the benefits of Morton ordering, nor to describe how (x,y,z) positions are mapped to locations on the Morton curve. For this we refer you to the Wikipedia article and the excellent blog posts by Jeroen Baert and Fabian Giesen. Instead, we wish to highlight a couple of optimizations which were useful in our implementation.

It’s been a little while since my last update on the progress of integrating Cubiquity with Unreal Engine 4 but plenty has been going on behind the scenes. Since the last video I’ve improved performance, added support for Coloured Cubes terrain, added LOD support, tested large map support and made sure that all of the functionality of Cubiquity is being exposed. A lot of time has just gone into making the code-base more future proof and reducing duplication between the different terrain modes.

Check out the video below to see the new features in motion as well as me just blowing stuff up at the 9:42 mark.

This more or less marks the features I wanted present for the first pre-release, so between now and then I will mostly be working on tidying things up and hopefully adding some initial documentation. I don’t have any ETA on the first release since this is fitting around my full-time job but any information will be posted here and on twitter.